The Signal Project

The Signal Project was born out of a lifelong obsession with Titanic, not the movie, but the actual wreck. The ship of dreams captured the public's imagination long before James Cameron's 1997 film, with consistent media coverage over the past century.

Titanic's discovery by a French/American team led by Robert Ballard on September 1, 19851, was just ten days shy of my fifth birthday. Early Titanic media was limited and grainy, like looking through a flashlight with late-twentieth-century state-of-the-art technology.

While the bow retained its iconic shape, the stern is so badly mangled that early images made it difficult to visualize the incredible tangle of debris as something that was once a ship. I remember squinting, turning my head at different angles, trying to make sense of what I was seeing on the 25-inch tube television we had at home.

Titanic has a community; it's a cherished responsibility to pass it on to the next generation of researchers and explorers better than we found it. This is the paradox of Titanic. It's returning to the earth from which it was crafted, and our time with it is limited. A growing part of Titanic's story is the ecosystem that she's become. Her most important contribution to us may yet be written.

Being part of this community, I've been aware that there are people in the world who think visiting the Titanic is a waste of time and money. Everything in moderation, and there is a valid argument that too much time has been spent on this specific site.

But the drive to learn, to know and understand is something unique to us as a species. The curiosity we have for the world around us pushes us past our current limits. The quest for Titanic has served a similar purpose by bringing people together to solve the complex problems that arise while chasing the holy grail safely because safety = success in this context.

Titanic is a ship with more than one hundred years' worth of accumulated lore. Being an old movie fan, "A Night to Remember" was top on my list as a kid. In 1980, we got "Raise the Titanic" added to the Titanic library, a love letter from enthusiasts who hoped that one day their ship would be found intact. Five years later, Titanic painter Ken Marschall described the grief he felt when he understood that "his ship" had broken apart.2

Titanic continues to linger in our imaginations and to each lover, it speaks directly. Its message is universal and also very personal, and it calls us to return, to see our heart at the bottom of the ocean, slowly returning to the earth from which it was created.

Cameron wasn't the only one visiting the site in recent decades. The 2010 RMS Titanic Expedition, led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and RMS Titanic, Inc., produced the first high-resolution, near-complete photomosaic images of the wreck site,3 which National Geographic later released to a wider audience.4

I was absolutely engrossed when these images were released. No longer having to twist my head around a grainy television, I could zoom and turn the wreck, seeing in totality the absolute devastation that litters the bottom of the North Atlantic. For the first time, I could see the stern's steel decking that had peeled back and folded over on itself during the spiraling descent to the bottom. I remember, again, having trouble wrapping my head around the extreme physics involved.

Over time, as researchers continued to study the wreck and documentaries kept popping up, I began to understand the forces involved to a greater degree. On a personal level, I'm cheering for the kid in me that struggled with science and math growing up. It helped me realize that my learning methods were different than what had been offered in the classroom.

Watching Titanic documentaries over the years, you also become familiar with the people and people-named submersibles. Alvin and Mir I & II are legends in the deep-sea space. Both have cylindrical hulls filled with knobs, buttons, gauges, and screens, leaving occupants tucked tight inside. While this shape is best for deep-sea pressure, allowing it to disperse evenly across the round surface, it does make for close quarters for their three occupants.

In the late 2010s, I was aware of some private efforts to develop and launch commercial submersibles for paying passengers to visit the Titanic. I suspect now that I was hearing about OceanGate, Inc. because Stockton Rush (OceanGate CEO and co-founder) spent considerable effort marketing his product, even taking CBS Sunday Morning host David Pogue and a cameraman in July 2022 down to film a segment for the show.5

On that hot summer day of June 18, 2023, I was inside my air-conditioned office as I read a headline to the effect of "tourist sub missing off the coast of Newfoundland." I knew "it" had finally happened.

What followed was an absolute media circus. Emily Hammermeister, former OceanGate intern, said that it had all the ingredients. "It had Titanic. It had billionaires. It had running out of time. The news had an oxygen countdown in the corner."6

And the reality is, the expected happened. The vessel imploded at depth. I had heard descriptions of what that would look like, and again, I found myself confronted with physics that were hard to wrap my mind around. I began to think, more from a place of disbelief, how the hell did this submersible get as far as it did?

I was able to put a name to Rob McCallum watching Netflix's Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster, yet another face I recognized from my decades of watching Titanic and deep-sea diving documentaries. It wasn't just what he said but how he said it that caught my ear, which was a very direct delivery emphasizing the word "would":

There was no way of knowing when [Titan] was going to fail, but it was a mathematical certainty that it would fail. So having a dive or two or ten to Titanic is not a measure of success.7 Rob McCallum

It's apparent from the available records that many people came into contact with OceanGate during the research, development, and deployment stages of the project. It's also apparent that many voices with safety concerns were not only ignored but also met with a work environment where psychological safety appears to have been functionally nonexistent.

The documentaries aired by both Netflix8 and Discovery Channel9 showed a culture that normalized deviance through a dysfunctional leadership structure, in which concerns were not only ignored but systematically shut down time after time. Listening to these accounts, I began to recognize people and patterns that I have worked with during my career.

But more importantly, I recognized myself. I heard Emily Hammermeister describe her workplace as "not normal,"10 something I have said myself about roles I've held. A face I know came to my mind when Tony Nissen said, "I worked for somebody that is probably a borderline clinical psychopath, but definitely a narcissist. How do you manage a person like that who owns the company?"11

The goal of The Signal Project is to give people a practical way to recognize when something is not normal at work, gauge how serious it is, and decide what to do in the moment, rather than in hindsight.

As I learned about the people involved in Titanic's own tragedy and wrapped my head around the tremendous physical forces, I began to recognize that my early views of the wreck in the 1980s were incomplete. No amount of squinting at grainy, low-resolution images was going to fix that.

It wasn't until the 2010s, when better tools became available, that understanding the forces Titanic endured became comprehensible. Higher-resolution, photomosaic images allowed us to twist and turn the wreck and develop a more complete picture of how this mighty ship was lost and cost the lives of 1,500 people.12

The adage "hindsight is 20/20" gets treated as a truth about clarity, but it's really a truth about timing. Hindsight isn't sharper; it's just later. The information was there. The question is why we can't act on it when it counts. How do we recognize signals in real time, from the inside, and take appropriate action?

OceanGate had signals. The hull had an acoustic monitoring system, which showed the carbon fiber hull responding to pressure at depth.13 But those signals were treated as reassurances rather than the warning signals they actually were.

Titan gives us something unique in organizational life: two clear verdicts. Physics shows that the warnings expressed by people like David Lochridge14 and Rob McCallum15 were valid, and the Marine Board of Investigation determined that the tragedy was preventable.16

Toward the end of the Netflix documentary, Tony Nissen said something that stuck with me:

The real mistake isn't in the idea that something wasn't classed. We didn't follow a set of regulations. That's not really the mistake. It's culture that caused this to happen. It's culture that killed the people. 100%.17 Tony Nissen

The Signal Project begins with Culture Killed the People, using the Titan as its first case study. The resolution here is clear; the submersible and the five people aboard are gone. By examining the language, actions, behaviors, and decisions of those involved, we will explore how ignored signals brought Titan to 3,34618 meters below the surface of the North Atlantic, where it imploded with all aboard — and what those signals can teach the rest of us.

Forty years ago, I was squinting at a grainy image of Titanic, trying to understand what I was looking at. In the years since, I've come to realize that the challenge wasn't unique to a shipwreck. We are constantly surrounded by signals, some obvious, some subtle, some easy to dismiss until hindsight makes them undeniable. Learning to recognize those signals, trust them, and act on them has become one of the defining pursuits of my life. The Signal Project is my attempt to share what I've learned.